OK, apologies to everyone for whom this isn't summer, but in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the height of summer, and a lot of us are travelling. Especially in the U.S., where a national holiday on Tuesday gives a lot of people a four-day weekend... or just a whole week off, in some cases. Like in the case of Sun, which shuts down for the whole week, since so few people would be there anyways.

I'll be doing the same thing this week, flying up north tomorrow to visit family. So you'll get a guest daily blog tomorrow, and I'll be posting the rest of the pages for the week from... um... wherever I can find wi-fi in Northern Michigan. I think it's going to involve driving really, really far.

I'm also planning on getting some coding work done on the road... yes, for me, vacation sometimes means getting into code, not out of it. The difference is, it's the stuff that really interests me. For those of you who listened to the podcast of a mini-talk[2] I did at JavaOne and are wondering where the video capture preview component stuff I talked about in Lloyd[3] is, I keep finding all sorts of truly scary crashing bugs, and I don't want to put anything out there until it's at least halfway solid. My latest fun has been a crasher on Intel Macs, where even Apple's sample code crashes the JVM if you start up the capture object, the SequenceGrabber from the AWT thread instead of your main thread. In fact, even launching from a separate thread dies if AWT event-dispatch is already up. So I need to see if things can be made happy if bringing up the capture stuff before touching AWT, maybe with some lazy-loading of expensive stuff (like the preview component, which repeatedly copies blocks of ARGB data between QuickTime and Java2D wrappers).

Oh, and I forgot that on Windows, the video capture will try to pre-allocate all available space on your current drive unless you tell it not to. And there's a fabulously obscure bug inolving out-of-spec behavior when you get callbacks with audio data instead of video. Isn't caputre fun?

Anyways, if I get a nice evening by the lake with the laptop, the iSight, and nobody bugging me, maybe I'll get some of this fixed and checked in...

In Java Today[4],
According to the JavaWorld article Java generates jingles in Sun's pockets[5], "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' new CEO, has promised to soon reveal the mystery of how much money his company gets from Java--a number that Wall Street is keen to learn because Java offers Sun its most distinctive technology advantage over competitors." The article says Sun has three key areas of Java-based revenue: license fees from device makers, developer training, and sales of Java tools to end-users.

The article Using Sun Java Studio Creator 2 on Mac OS X[6]explains the benefits of developing professional Web applications using Mac OS X and Sun Java Studio Creator 2. In addition, a short tutorial is provided to demonstrate how to extend one of Java Studio Creator's sample applications.

Head First Java[7] author Kathy Sierra advocates idea-sharing and open-source in her blog Mosh Pit as Innovation Model[8]. "'Professionals' in any field come in two flavors: Knowledge Sharers and Knowledge Hoarders. The hoarders believe in the value of their 'Intellectual Property' (IP). The products of their mind must be carefully guarded lest anyone steal their precious ideas. But let's face it--if our only 'strategic advantage' is our ideas, we're probably screwed."

Mason Glaves writes about The Impending "Implementation Independent" Interface[9] in today's Weblogs[10].
"A week or so ago, I wrote on some of the difficulties of testing Swing-based applications and promised a look ahead at an emerging trend in UI design that might offer a solution at a more fundamental level than the workarounds we use at present. Today I am going to look into the concept of something called the 'implementation independent' UI and discuss why it may be something we should spend our time looking into."

REQ: alt.web-browser.die.die.die[11], subtitled (or... Where Swing Really Shouldn't Venture), is a blog in which Simon Morris says
"GMail and its like are a dead end. Let's re-group and throw our weight behind a real solution."

Kirill Grouchnikov shows off aTetris Easter egg for Swing applications[12]:
"Here is how you can launch Tetris-inspired line of games right from your favourite Swing app. You can also plant it as an Easter egg in that application you're shipping tomorrow."

In today's Forums[13],jplemieux addresses a much-sought Swing feature inRe: AutoCompleteDecorator w/JComboBox[14]:
"Glazed Lists has had a solution for autocompletion for a little while now. It includes filtering the ComboBoxModel as you type into the ComboBoxEditor, so it might be worthwhile checking out if you have 5000+ items in your model. The behaviour is meant to mimic that of the Firefox URL address picker which narrows your URL history as you enter text. It supports a strict-mode that should behave correctly with your numeric model data."

Richard Bair brings animation to JTables in RE: Flashing cells[15]:
"Lemme clarify. The renderer is going to be reused for multiple cells, so you can't have logic in the renderer that actually flashes. What I mean by use the renderer is, let the renderer decide whether to show the text or not. For example, you should have some other timer, separate from the table, highlighters, or renderers that alternates whether a cell is painted or not (causing the flashing). Have it call repaint on the table, passing the exact cell that needs to be repainted so that performance is decent. Let the renderer figure out whether the text should be shown or not (when the renderer is created, point it to some object that knows whether the text should be painted or not."

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Anyone travelling this summer?

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